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After reading “Rails is yesterday’s software”, I need to reply

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Re: After reading “Rails is yesterday’s software”, I need to reply

#151

Post by erik14th »

dcrall wrote: post #71
danenania wrote: post #64

Moving on from Rails sounds great until you try to build a serious web app with one of the alternatives. While I think that many of the architectural criticisms are valid, Rails demonstrates the primacy of ecosystem and strong conventions over language design and cs theory. 'Tomorrow's' languages and frameworks would do well to take heed. Winning this war has as much to do with culture and marketing as algorithms and…

I agree that Rails' strong opinions are still a strength. I like Clojure a lot, but for someone new to the language trying to get a Clojure web app started is like pulling teeth. Elixir and Phoenix, with their connections to the Ruby community, really get this, and I think they provide a much better introductory experience.

Have you tried luminus[0]? I found it to be quite straightforward to get started. What I didn't like about clojure is that it smells like java a tiny bit too much and there's too much to choose from be it language abstractions or libraries I guess that's what you refer to as "pulling teeth".

I'm gonna try Phoenix for my next project, even though I really like Django and I have never been too much into rails or ruby. My other option would be Django + socket.io, and I think that would be the more mature stack, but as much as I like javascript and python I think that would lead to more complexity and thus make the project harder to maintain. I may be stabbing myself in the foot, but let's hope not :D

[0]http://www.luminusweb.net/

Re: After reading “Rails is yesterday’s software”, I need to reply

#152

Post by gshulegaard »

danenania wrote: post #64

Moving on from Rails sounds great until you try to build a serious web app with one of the alternatives. While I think that many of the architectural criticisms are valid, Rails demonstrates the primacy of ecosystem and strong conventions over language design and cs theory. 'Tomorrow's' languages and frameworks would do well to take heed. Winning this war has as much to do with culture and marketing as algorithms and…

Just curious, but what do you consider a serious web app?

I have had great success with Python across a variety of different applications.

A lot of people seem to end up comparing/picking between Python and Ruby so I am curious for my own knowledge what type of serious application does Ruby make easy where Python makes difficult?

I also think the overall gravitation towards microservice architecture generally makes language choice less important on the whole...but that's just me.

Re: After reading “Rails is yesterday’s software”, I need to reply

#153

Post by borkborkbork »

engineerDave wrote: post #144
busterarm wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe it and know that sucked, but unfortunately in Rails 3 we got caught with our collective pants down in terms of security. Nobody competent was really auditing it (as was demonstrated against Github) to match the amount of momentum that it had. I see that as more of a Black Swan event than any inherent problem with the framework (yes, I'm basically blaming its users). This wasn't typical of the Rails 2 to 3 u…

I think your memory of the 2 -> 2.1 -> 2.2 -> 2.3 (if you were lucky to get bundler running) to 3 to almost immediate 3.1 with massive changes (asset pipeline) upgrade is a little fuzzy. It was the suck. A lot of companies I know of are still running Rails 2 because of this change.

Which companies? _trollface_

Re: After reading “Rails is yesterday’s software”, I need to reply

#154

Post by borkborkbork »

engineerDave wrote: post #145
borkborkbork wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This problem isn't specific to Rails 3.1. At some point, your frameworks need to be upgraded, because at some point the developers stop supporting your version. Django announced recently that 1.7 would no longer be getting security fixes. The question is: how much will it cost to upgrade when the day comes? Frameworks and communities that encourage less magic and less dependencies will always be less costly to mainta…

true but even staying current across small SemVer changes can be a relatively large burden

Agreed

Re: After reading “Rails is yesterday’s software”, I need to reply

#155

Post by askyourmother »

danenania wrote: post #64

Moving on from Rails sounds great until you try to build a serious web app with one of the alternatives. While I think that many of the architectural criticisms are valid, Rails demonstrates the primacy of ecosystem and strong conventions over language design and cs theory. 'Tomorrow's' languages and frameworks would do well to take heed. Winning this war has as much to do with culture and marketing as algorithms and…

So django gets it right. Laravel and symfony seem to get it right, yesod for Haskell gets it right - basically Rails is pretty awful, always was, but the crowd got caught up in five minute blogs and shiny magic to question the questionable insecure code, the rather suspect architecture.

Re: After reading “Rails is yesterday’s software”, I need to reply

#156

Post by askyourmother »

noam87 wrote: post #133
danenania wrote: post #64

Moving on from Rails sounds great until you try to build a serious web app with one of the alternatives. While I think that many of the architectural criticisms are valid, Rails demonstrates the primacy of ecosystem and strong conventions over language design and cs theory. 'Tomorrow's' languages and frameworks would do well to take heed. Winning this war has as much to do with culture and marketing as algorithms and…

Elixir/Phoenix gets this right. Working on a side project right now and so far it's a very enjoyable experience. I find the abstractions much more intuitive. The framework as a whole is just as "magical" for fast prototyping, but it's composed of much simpler individual modules that are easy to wrap one's head around. It's surprising how mature the whole ecosystem feels considering it's still quite niche. It helps to…

Wait till hex is filled with crap like gems are today. The Rails programmers are coming to elixir as it had already been called the new Rails, and they will follow the pragprog book to it the new promised land.

If you enjoyed early adopter status in elixir phoenix, wait till it is Rails mk 2. It will suck big time.

Re: After reading “Rails is yesterday’s software”, I need to reply

#157

Post by wvenable »

ryanmarsh wrote: post #122

Many of the complaints against Rails in this HN discussion are around code base maintainability, gem proliferation, and amateurs. Any tool that allows the rapid (almost effortless) accretion of complexity will suffer these problems. It goes with the territory.

I think that's a good point. JavaScript with Node is arguably worse than Rails for exactly that reason.

Re: After reading “Rails is yesterday’s software”, I need to reply

#158

Post by [deleted] »

akmiller wrote: post #132
dcrall wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that Rails' strong opinions are still a strength. I like Clojure a lot, but for someone new to the language trying to get a Clojure web app started is like pulling teeth. Elixir and Phoenix, with their connections to the Ruby community, really get this, and I think they provide a much better introductory experience.

I've been doing Clojure for the better part of 3 years now and I'm not sure I get why people feel doing web development in Clojure is hard. Our first foray in Clojure was/is an API to manage our users that was built by 2 developers who were new to the language and has been running largely unmodified since being released. I actually believe the opposite. Jumping into and doing Clojure web development is extremely simp…

[deleted]

Re: After reading “Rails is yesterday’s software”, I need to reply

#159

Post by freyr »

danenania wrote: post #64

Moving on from Rails sounds great until you try to build a serious web app with one of the alternatives. While I think that many of the architectural criticisms are valid, Rails demonstrates the primacy of ecosystem and strong conventions over language design and cs theory. 'Tomorrow's' languages and frameworks would do well to take heed. Winning this war has as much to do with culture and marketing as algorithms and…

> for a straightforward web app, you'll likely spend at least twice as long to get something working

For a straightforward web app, Rails is probably a fine fit. For something less straightforward, it can shackle you down the road. The alternatives are an up-front investment that can save you time and effort down the road, but also give you enough leeway to make mistakes.

Re: After reading “Rails is yesterday’s software”, I need to reply

#160

Post by askyourmother »

busterarm wrote: post #103
danenania wrote: post #64

Moving on from Rails sounds great until you try to build a serious web app with one of the alternatives. While I think that many of the architectural criticisms are valid, Rails demonstrates the primacy of ecosystem and strong conventions over language design and cs theory. 'Tomorrow's' languages and frameworks would do well to take heed. Winning this war has as much to do with culture and marketing as algorithms and…

It's all about how you prioritize the problems you need to solve. At my current job we primarily use Wordpress. Why Wordpress? Because we have a large and non-technical content team, 260+ websites and several tens of thousands of pages of content that need to go up quickly. We're just 4 developers - about 1 for every 8 content & marketing people we have. We spend very little of our time on frontend. Tell me that you'…

WordPress is a pretty crazy codebase, yet, it seems sane compared to Rails. Interesting that WordPress as a service are moving to a node.js backend from PHP - even they chase shiny too
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